The Great Afghan Bailout: It's Time to Change Names, Switch Analogies

It's time, as a start, to stop calling our expanding war in Central and South
Asia "the Afghan War" or "the Afghanistan War." If Obama's
special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke doesn't
want to, why should we? Recently, in a BBC interview, he insisted that "the
'number one problem' in stabilizing Afghanistan was Taliban sanctuaries in western
Pakistan, including tribal areas along the Afghan border and cities like Quetta"
in the Pakistani province of Baluchistan.

And isn't he right? After all, the U.S. seems to be in the process of trading in a limited war in a mountainous,
poverty-stricken country of 27 million people for one in an advanced nation
of 167 million, with a crumbling economy, rising extremism, advancing corruption,
and a large military armed with nuclear weapons. Worse yet, the war in Pakistan
seems to be expanding inexorably (and in tandem with American war planning) from the tribal
borderlands ever closer to the heart of the country.

These days, Washington has even come up with a neologism for the change:
"Af-Pak," as in the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater of operations. So,
in the name of realism and accuracy, shouldn't we retire "the Afghan War"
and begin talking about the far more disturbing "Af-Pak War"?

And while we're at it, maybe we should retire the word "surge" as
well. Right now, as the Obama plan for that Af-Pak War is being "rolled
out," newspaper headlines have been surging when it comes to accepting
the surge paradigm. Long before the administration's "strategic review"
of the war had even been completed, President Obama was reportedly persuaded by former Iraq surge
commander, now CentCom commander, General David Petraeus to "surge"
another 17,000 troops into Afghanistan, starting this May.

It seems to matter little that even General Petraeus wonders whether the word should be applied.
("The commander of the U.S. Central Command said Friday that an Iraq-style
surge cannot be a solution to the problems in Afghanistan.") There are,
however, other analogies that might better capture the scope and nature of the
new strategic plan for the Af-Pak War. Think bailout. Think A.I.G.

The Costs of an Expanding War

In truth, what we're about to watch should be considered nothing less than
the Great Afghan (or Af-Pak) bailout.

On Friday morning, the president officially rolled out his long-awaited
"comprehensive new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan," a plan
without a name. If there was little news
in it, that was only because of the furious leaking of prospective parts of
it over the previous weeks. So many trial balloons, so little time.

In a recent "60 Minutes" interview (though not in his Friday announcement),
the president also emphasized the need for an "exit
strategy" from the war. Similarly, American commander in Afghanistan, General
David McKiernan, has been speaking of a possible "tipping
point," three to five years away, that might lead to "eventual departure."
Nonetheless, almost every element of the new plan - both those the president
mentioned Friday and the no-less-crucial ones that didn't receive a nod - seem
to involve the word "more"; that is, more U.S. troops, more U.S. diplomats,
more civilian advisors, more American and NATO military advisors to train more
Afghan troops and police, more base and outpost building, more opium-eradication
operations, more aid, more money to the Pakistani military - and strikingly
large-scale as that may be, all of that doesn't even include the "covert
war," fought mainly via unmanned aerial vehicles, along the Pakistani tribal
borderlands, which is clearly going to intensify.

In the coming year, that CIA-run drone war, according to leaked reports, may be expanded from the tribal areas
into Pakistan's more heavily populated Baluchistan province where some of the
Taliban leadership is supposedly holed up. In addition, so reports in British
papers claim, the U.S. is seriously considering a soft coup-in-place against
Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Disillusioned with the widespread corruption
in, and inefficiency of, his government, the U.S. would create a new "chief
executive" or prime ministerial post not in the Afghan constitution -
and then install some reputedly less corrupt (and
perhaps more malleable) figure. Karzai would supposedly be turned into a figurehead "father
of the nation." Envoy Holbrooke has officially denied that Washington is planning any
such thing, while a spokesman for Karzai denounced the idea (both, of course,
just feeding the flames of the Afghan rumor mill).

What this all adds up to is an ambitious doubling down on just about every
bet already made by Washington in these last years - from the counterinsurgency
war against the Taliban and the counter-terrorism war against al-Qaeda to the
financial love/hate relationship with the Pakistani
military and its intelligence services underway since at least the Nixon years
of the early 1970s. (Many of the flattering things now being said by U.S. officials
about Pakistani Chief of the Army Staff General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, for instance,
were also said about the now fallen autocrat
Pervez Musharraf when he held the same position.)

Despite that mention of the need for an exit strategy and a presidential assurance
that both the Afghan and Pakistani governments will be held to Iraqi-style "benchmarks"
of accountability in the period to come, Obama's is clearly a jump-in-with-both-feet
strategy and, not surprisingly, is sure to involve a massive infusion of new
funds. Unlike with A.I.G., where the financial inputs of the U.S. government
are at least announced, we don't even have a ballpark figure for how much is
actually involved right now, but it's bound to be staggering. Just supporting
those 17,000 new American troops already ordered into Afghanistan, many destined
to be dispatched to still-to-be-built bases and outposts in the embattled southern
and eastern parts of the country for which all materials must be trucked in,
will certainly cost billions.

Recently, the Washington Post's Walter Pincus dug up some of the construction and transportation
costs associated with the war in Afghanistan and found that, as an employer,
the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers comes in second only to the Afghan government
in that job-desperate country. The Corps is spending about $4 billion this year
alone on road-building activities, and has slated another $4-$6 billion for
more of the same in 2010; it has, according to Pincus, already spent $2 billion
constructing facilities for the expanding Afghan army and police forces, and
has another $1.2 billion set aside for more such facilities this year. It is
also likely to spend between $400 million and $1.4 billion on as many as six new bases, assorted outposts,
and associated air fields American troops will be sent to in the south.

Throw in hardship
pay, supplies, housing, and whatever else for the hundreds of diplomats and
advisors in that promised "civilian surge"; add in the $1.5 billion
a year the president promised in economic aid to Pakistan over the next five
years, a tripling of such aid (as urged by Vice President Biden when he
was still a senator); add in unknown amounts of aid to the Pakistani and Afghan
militaries. Tote it up and you've just scratched the surface of Washington's
coming investment in the Af-Pak War. (And lest you imagine that these costs
might, at least, be offset by savings from Obama's plan to draw down American
forces in Iraq, think again. A recent study by the Government Accountability
Office suggests that "Iraq-related expenditures"
will actually increase "during the withdrawal and for several years after
its completion.")

Put all this together and you can see why the tactical word "surge"
hardly covers what's about to happen. The administration's "new" strategy
and its "new" thinking - including its urge to peel off less committed
Taliban supporters and reach out for help to regional powers - should really
be re-imagined as but another massive attempted bailout, this time of an Afghan
project, now almost 40 years old, that in foreign policy terms is indeed our
A.I.G.

They've now done their "stress tests," which, in the world of foreign
policy, are called "strategic reviews." They recognize that unexpected
forces are pressing in on them. They grasp that the American global system,
as it existed since the truncated American century began, is in danger. They're
ready to bite the bullet and bail it out. Their goal is to save what they care
about in ways that they know.

Unfortunately, the end result is likely to be that, as with A.I.G., we, the
American people, could end up "owning" 80% of the Af-Pak project without
ever "nationalizing" it - without ever, that is, being in actual
control. In fact, if things go as badly as they could in the Af-Pak War, A.I.G.
might end up looking like a good deal by comparison.

The foreign policy team is no more likely to exhibit genuinely outside-the-box
thinking than the team of Tim Geithner and Larry Summers
has been. Their clear and desperate urge is to operate in the known zone, the
one in which the U.S. is always imagined to be part of the solution to any problem
on the planet, never part of the problem itself.

In foreign policy (as in economic policy), it took the Bush team less than
eight years to steer the ship of state into the shallows where it ran disastrously
aground. And yet, in response, after months of "strategic review,"
this team of inside-the-Beltway realists has come up with a combination of Af-Pak
War moves that are almost blindingly expectable.

In the end, this sort of thinking is likely to leave the Obama administration
hostage to its own projects as well as unprepared for the onrush of the unexpected
and unknown, whose arrival may be the only thing that can be predicted with
assurance right now. Whether as custodians of the imperial economy or the imperial
frontier, Obama's people are lashed to the past, to Wall Street and the national
security state. They are ill-prepared to take the necessary full measure of
our world.

If you really want a "benchmark" for measuring how our world has
been shifting on its axis, consider that we have all lived to see a Chinese
premier appear at what was, in essence, an international news conference and
seriously upbraid Washington for its handling of the global economy. That might
have been surprising in itself. Far more startling was the response of Washington.
A year ago, the place would have been up in arms. This time around, from White
House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs ("There's no safer
investment in the world than in the United States...") to the president himself ("Not just the
Chinese government, but every investor can have absolute confidence in the soundness
of investments in the United States..."), Washington's response was to
mollify and reassure.

Face it, we've entered a new universe. The "homeland" is in turmoil,
the planetary frontiers are aboil. Change - even change we don't want to believe
in - is in the air.

In the end, as with the Obama economic team, so the foreign policy team may
be pushed in new directions sooner than anyone imagines and, willy-nilly, into
some genuinely new thinking about a collapsing world. But not now. Not yet.
Like our present financial bailouts, like that extra $30 billion that went into A.I.G. recently,
the new Obama plan is superannuated on arrival. It represents graveyard thinking.